Music played a significant part in the Zabinskis' life and their piano has a large role in keeping their human guests safe during the war.ĭiane Ackerman wrote the Zabinskis' story in The Zookeeper's Wife (2007) on which the film was based. She is the first of more than 300 Jews that the couple will hide almost in plain sight during the war by getting the Germans to agree for them to turn the zoo into a pig farm.Īll of them survived except for two, according to the postscript at the end. Jan and Antonina hide the wife in their basement while her husband goes into the ghetto to help his people. The Zabinskis have many friends, among them a Jewish couple. Their first task, headed by Heck, now a captain and the Reich's newly appointed chief zoologist, is to kill off almost all the remaining animals "because they will not survive the winter." Heck had hidden the fact from Antonina that he wanted the animals for genetic experimentation. The German soldiers move into the zoo and take over spaces that once housed animals. Germany invades Poland months later and the bombings begin, traumatizing the family and animals. It is a sad day when the trucks arrive to take the best of the Warsaw Zoo's animals. Heck makes it a point to declare his nonpolitical status. Lutz Heck (Daniel Brühl), who heads the Berlin Zoo, visits the Zabinskis and convinces Antonina to persuade Jan to send him their best animals for safekeeping during the inevitable war that is looming over Europe.
It seems like an idyllic existence for the Jan and Antonina, who work together as partners to run the zoo. Nonthreatening animals roam the zoo freely and a couple of small cats even sleep in the house with the family.
In fact, the film opens with her helping to deliver a baby elephant. She is what we would today call an animal whisperer for her skills with animals in distress.
Jan is the head of the zoo but Antonina is not afraid to get her hands dirty. Antonina Zabinski (Jessica Chastain) and her husband, Jan (Johan Heldenbergh), live with their son, Ryszard (Tim Radford and Val Maloku), in a villa at the Warsaw Zoo. The film opens not long before Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. " The Zookeeper's Wife," the latest film from director Niki Caro ("Whale Rider"), is perhaps one of the most unknown historical dramas that took place during World War II and forms part of the canon of Holocaust films. Jessica Chastain as Antonina Zabinski in "The Zookeeper's Wife" (Focus Features)
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